


Breathing is Boring

by LokiOfSassgaard



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-07
Updated: 2010-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-28 01:37:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6309139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LokiOfSassgaard/pseuds/LokiOfSassgaard





	Breathing is Boring

  


The water wasn’t as cold as he’d expected it to be. It was almost warm, actually; comforting, in a way. Dancing somewhere between warm and cold the way bath water does after you realise that you lost track of the time, and in reading a good book, you check your watch to find out that two hours have just been spent in the tub.

There was a light and familiar tickle on his neck, and he focused on that, almost trying to lean into it. Small pockets of air trapped in his hair and clothes that would eventually break free and find their way toward the surface, making trails along the contour of his skull, around his neck, up behind his ears. He could feel every one of them, and could create a mental image of each and every trail that was forged along his skin. It reminded him of time spent as a young boy, when he would time how long he could hold his breath under the water. 51 seconds had been his record. How or why he remembered that now, he wasn’t sure. He didn� ��t care, either, but just remembering that number held some sort of weight in his mind.

51 seconds. There was a reason he was remembering that piece of information just then. Why? It seemed like a terribly random thing to be remembering at that moment.

The body copes with stressful situations in fascinating and unusual ways. The same moment John realised why this particular memory was brought to the surface of his mind was the moment his lungs had decided that they’d had enough. In a completely involuntary and treacherous fit, he exhaled the breath he’d been holding. His lungs tried to inhale again and an alarm somewhere in the unevolved part of his brain that controlled his fight or flight mechanism told him to stop mucking about and get to the surface before he drowned. Still disorientated, he managed to figure out which way was up through sheer luck, and pushed himself in that direction.

Once above the surface, he let himself cough and choke and try to breathe all at the same time, resulting in more wild coughing and choking. The room spun madly around him, making the edge of the pool irritatingly and terrifyingly difficult to locate. As he splashed around frantically, he realised that the danger of drowning was far lower than he’d realised, when his foot hit the bottom of the pool. He could stand at this point, with his head well above the surface.

Still panting heavily, and trying desperately to get control of the room spin, John surveyed the area. While bits and pieces of charred building still cracked around him, bits and pieces of the preceding scene fell into place in his mind, like a film that had been incorrectly spliced and then played out of order.

Moriarty. Explosion. Gun fire. John had tried to stop it, and had been thrown into the pool for his efforts. Sherlock was—

Sherlock.

Sherlock.

John shook his head to try to clear it, and tried to make his way toward the edge of the pool, the heavy, smoke-filled air only marginally easier to breathe than the water had been. By the time he had managed to haul himself out of the pool, he was out of breath, and didn’t think he’d ever get it back. Breathing in hurt. Breathing out hurt. Not breathing at all hurt. Whether it was the smoke or the water in his lungs was entirely inconsequential, and he knew only that he had to get the hell out of the building before what remained of its structural integrity failed completely and finished the job of killing him.

The air was filled with a terrible noise. Shrill and cutting through John’s skull as it drowned out everything else. He knew what the sound meant, since he’d heard it before, when a flash grenade had been thrown into a room he’d been taking cover in. It would go away eventually, but he could only pray that when it did, it wouldn’t take his hearing with it.

He rolled over to his hands and knees, making a slow and very pained job a t getting back to his feet. To his right, he could see someone lying, face down, in a doorway. For a moment, he thought it was Moriarty. He wanted it to be Moriarty, and when you want to see something, your brain has a way of making you believe that’s what you’re seeing. John almost moved to the prone figure, but something clicked, loud and violently, in his mind. Whoever that was on the floor, Moriarty or not, they weren’t going anywhere. If the blast hadn’t killed him outright, then the bleeding would finish him off very shortly.

No. Whoever he was, he was not important. John looked around wildly, spotting another prone body to his left; this one in a familiar black coat. The service pistol was no longer in Sherlock’s hand. The blast had been bigger than Sherlock had anticipated, and he didn’t have enough time to get away. John felt the familiar heavy weight on his chest as he stumbled across the floor and fell to his knees beside Sherlock, his hands movi ng independently of the rest of his mind. He’d been trained to perform under pressure and stress, and before he realised what he was even doing, he began checking Sherlock’s vitals, making sure that the man was still breathing and his heart still pumping. He could feel a pulse – weak, but persistent – and allowed himself to breathe deeply.

He hadn’t heard anyone approach him, and when the hands fell on his shoulders, his heart jumped up into his throat. Everything in his mind knew that it was Moriarty (or one of his men) come to finish the job, and when he rounded on the owner of the hands, he was confused to see a man in a paramedic’s uniform.

When had they been called?

The medic was talking to him, but John still couldn’t hear. He could only shake his head weakly and close his eyes, not even sure if he knew how to speak any more.

When John walked into the flat, he was overcome by a thick stench coming from the kitchen. It smel led as though something had died.

No. It smelled exactly like something had died. John knew that smell, and it was something he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to come across again. At least he had the oddly comforting thought that since it was in his flat, whatever (whoever) was making the smell had already been properly reported. He tried not to think about what ghastly experiment had been left on the kitchen table in all the recent confusion, hoping that Sherlock would clean it up quickly.

He found Sherlock in his favourite chair, idly plucking strings on his violin and staring at the carpet. There was a scarf tied around Sherlock’s left arm, just below the elbow, with a dark stain blossoming out from one spot.

“Thought I’d find you here,” John said as he moved to open the windows, only to find that they still hadn’t been repaired from the initial blast across the street.

Sherlock watched him from the corner of his eye, but said nothing.

“You shouldn’t just leave like that,” John continued. “There could be an undetected problem. You need to be under observation.”

“I couldn’t think there,” said Sherlock. “It’s too sterile. Too busy. Too loud.” As though to contradict himself, he loudly played several lines on his violin on a seemingly endless repetition, the strings squealing at his careless bow work.

“Besides,” Sherlock continued, once he was finished. “You’re a doctor. And now you’re here. Even though you shouldn’t be, either.”

“Well, you left,” John defended. “I had to find you, in case you’d passed out somewhere.”

He hated arguing with Sherlock. Everything the man said was, in some convoluted and twisted way, correct. He had been in as much danger of an underlying head injury as Sherlock was, and John wasn’t sure that he trusted him to know what to do in the event that something should decide to complicate itself. But he did know S herlock well enough to know that getting him back to hospital wasn’t going to happen, and resigning himself to this fact, he approached Sherlock.

“Let me take a look at that, at least,” he said, pointing to the scarf tied around Sherlock’s arm. “You tore out your drip, didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t exactly take it with me,” Sherlock pointed out. Still, he obliged, and held out his arm for John to remove the scarf.

It was a ghastly floral pattern, and John had the feeling that Sherlock had stolen the first fabric item he could find to staunch the bleeding. Gingerly untying the knot, John assessed the damage. The bleeding had stopped by now, leaving a heavy crust over top a large, dark bruise, which looked almost black against Sherlock’s pale skin.

“You’ve probably collapsed the vein,” John said, holding back on a sigh. “You should get this cleaned up to avoid infection, at least.”

Sherlock took his arm back. “I’m fi ne,” he insisted.

“You’re not.” He didn’t expect Sherlock to believe him, but it needed to be said.

“It’s nothing I haven’t had happen before.”

He let the implication settle in, and went back to idly plucking strings on his violin. John just stared at him, not sure how the conversation had been twisted into going down this path. But Sherlock had said that he was clean, and John wanted to believe it. Sherlock’s phone sounded an alert – a shrill, artificially created sound – that cut through the silence, but he made no move to answer the text.

“Can I trust you to keep breathing, at least, while I go take a shower?” John asked as he stood back up.

“Breathing’s boring, but if you insist.”

John ignored the snipe as he turned toward his bedroom to fetch something clean to change into. Sherlock kept his eyes focused on the same spot on the floor, watching John from his peripheral. He waited until he heard the sho wer running before reaching for his phone and checking the text.

Fancy a rematch?  
xoxo

The faint trace of a smile touched the corner of Sherlock’s mouth as he put his phone back down, deliberately avoiding a response. The rematch would happen either way, so he didn’t see the point in accepting the offer. He knew Moriarty wouldn’t just jump into anything, either. He’d bide his time; wait and plan and scheme, only making his next strike when both Sherlock and John had finally become convinced that it would never happen.

When John finally returned to the sitting room in his pyjamas, a full forty-five minutes later, he found Sherlock sitting in exactly the same position as when he left, staring at the floor and occasionally plucking a string. When Sherlock unexpectedly began abusing the poor instrument again, John let himself fall back onto the sofa, covering his head with a pillow. He had been warned about this, albeit in fairly convoluted terms, so he knew that complaining wouldn’t do much good. Whenever he wanted to complain, he’d remind himself that being annoyed is far better than being in pain – psychosomatic or not – and he decided that it was a fair trade. He just hoped that something interesting would happen soon, just so he could keep the terms of his trade, or worse, keep from being annoyed and in pain.

Sherlock’s phone sounded its text alert three more times in the next quarter hour. John never heard it over the violin, and Sherlock ignored it out of spite.

  



End file.
